You stand there, on guard, fighting to clear the panic and gather your thoughts. Like some instant creepy cream of cholesterol, some cellular duck fat clotted by epinephrine, fear has clogged your mental conduits. All you can think of is that whatever happened to Q-Jo Huffington, you must not allow it to happen to you.
It occurs to you, naturally, to make a run for the door, but you automatically reject the notion of running, on the grounds that to be caught running would be an embarrassment. (Better dead than red, eh, Gwen?) Setting the cup and saucer on the sofa, you commence to stroll toward the door, just strolling nonchalantly, dum-dum-di-dum, trying not to interpret every awful shadow, thrown by every African mask, as a lunatic with a knife. Separating the huge living room from the front door is a small vestibule, and as you stroll into the vestibule, arms innocently swinging, dum-dum-di-dum, you notice that an interior door opens into it, and light is seeping over the doorsill. Its the bathroom! Which you must pass to reach the exit.
You hesitate. What if this is a trap? Whether an insidious trap with harmful consequences or one of Diamonds ostensibly instructive practical jokes, in either case the very notion of it infuriates you. Cold globs of fear start to dissolve in a hot acid bath of anger. As you rummage in your purse for your trusty can of Mace, you can sense your trumpet bending upward at an angle that would have made Gillespie dizzy.
NINE THIRTY-FOUR A.M.
Tiptoeing now, Mace at the ready, you steal past the bathroom. Just let him try something! Your heart is pounding against your sternum like a landlords fist against your daddys jambs, but so great is your fury and defiance that you are almost sorry when you reach the exit without interference.
You pause. Are you absolutely sure you want to vamoose? Yes. Yes, you are. You arent merely fleeing a disagreeable situation, you may well be escaping with your life. Go on. Get out of here!
Alas, the handle will not turn. In any direction. You yank, you twist, you pull, you push, all for naught, because the door is locked tighter than a prudes lips. In vain, you search for a latch of some sort. Apparently, you have been locked in with a key.
Slowly, you release the frozen handle and turn around. Nothing has changed. Thunder House remains empty, dim, and quiet. Around the corner, in the living room, the slide projector buzzes like a bug in a jar. On your left, six feet away, a hem of light continues to show beneath the bathroom door.
Your options, it strikes you, are limited. You could look for a phone and play 911 roulette. (These days, the calls for help are myriad, the responses few.) You could seek assistance from that Native American, that Twister character, assuming Twister is on the premises and is not a party to whatever it is that is happening here. You could simply stand in the vestibule and await Diamonds next move, allowing him to determine your fate. Or you could take the initiative, go on the offensive, become a boiler room broker in the bucket shop of life. In your current state of exasperation, the last choice seems inevitable.
With a toss of your rapidly graying hair, and with a squeaky, kittenish version of a battle cry forming in your throat, you charge the bathroom door and throw it open, ready to Mace the bastard from here to Timbuktu.
NINE THIRTY-SEVEN A.M.
Nothing in your experience, not even Boschs Temptation of Saint Anthony, a reproduction of which your mother tacked to your nursery wall and whose inexhaustible grotesqueries in your earliest years you were obliged to watch in lieu of television (until Grandma Mati, crossing herself like a motorized bandoleer, ripped it down), no, nothing, not even the pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, has prepared you for the tableau you have now intruded upon in Larry Diamonds toilet.
Naked below the waist, Diamond is on his hand and knees on a handsome, and probably expensive, Afghani kilim, busily stuffing green leaves up his rectum.
Jesus! you gasp. The erstwhile genius of the Pacific Northwest equities market looks like an incomplete mutant, an alien life-form from a homemade sci-fi movie, a kind of cut-rate half-man, half-plant crawling to a garden-store Bethlehem to be born. Either that or hes acting out a nightmare in which he gives live birth to a Caesar salad. Jesus!
I dont believe I rang for the maid, says Diamond matter of factly, cocking his head to one side and gazing up at you.
Thoroughly mortified, you commence to retreat, walking backward, geisha-style: steps tiny, mincing and close together, punctuated by meek, apprehensive bows; and all the while concealing the Mace canister behind your back like a bottle of inferior sake. Diamond signals you to stay, although the process by which he signals is somewhat fuzzy, considering that he is busily impersonating a three-legged dog trying to free its haunches from an azalea bush. Forgive my primitive presentation, he appeals, but it is not easy to summarily absolve a pantsless man who wears a wicked grin on one end and skunk cabbage on the other.
Its my therapy, he explains. Big medicine. He releases the wad of leaves he was applying to his rump, letting it fall to the floor, and picks up a fresh batch from a sheet of damp newspaper. Here, he says, sensing that you are about to Madame Butterfly toward the vestibule again. He hands you the soppy bouquet for your reluctant scrutiny. Twisters daddy sends me these specimens of Oklahomas finest flora. Big medicine.
This is what youre using to treat your-your …
My cancer? Yes. Yes, indeed. Wide Place in the Road is a celebrated healer, although Im forced to say his herbal prescription seems to be losing its effectiveness where my particular infirmity is concerned. Maybe I should try smoking the stuff.
Jesus, you say to yourself. The poor, poor guy. How could I ever have thought … ?
Your heart, which is already going out to him, receives both a prod and a caution when, lifting the leaves closer to your face, you detect that they release an aroma like burnt sugar, caramel, or tinned fruit cocktail.
NINE FORTY-ONE A.M.
You-you-you must be in pain, you stammer, feeling that you should probably wipe his brow or something, but youve got the wet leaves in one fist and the Mace in the other, and you are a trifle uncertain, in any case, whether you want to lay a comforting hand on him or excuse yourself on a permanent basis.
Oh, its a bit like camping on a blowtorch, but everybodys got a hard-luck story. They warn us when were kids that were going to have to suffer, but they neglect to mention the indignity. What self-respecting fetus, if shown its future as a proctology patient, boot-camp recruit, or game-show contestant, would still elect to be born? He looks away, and you seize the opportunity to drop the Mace into a laundry basket. Of course, he continues, a big front does have a big back. Yamaguchi, that old rascal, could turn out to be my hero if he plays his cards right. Meanwhile, it seems, Im on my knees.
How-how bad is it? You inch a geisha step closer to him.
It only hurts when I dont laugh, he says. With that, he raises up on his knees, whereupon you find yourself looking directly at his-his what-do-you-call-it. And with its single epicanthic eye, it is looking back at you! Immediately, you are struck by how, how altogether elegant it appears. When compared with Belfords, that is. Belfords penis, while probably exceeding Diamonds in length and breadth, is a wrinkly, crooked, blood-gorged thing that so reminds you of a boiled turkey neck that you scarcely can bear to look at it. Diamonds shaft, on the other hand, is like an alabaster gun barrel-smooth, straight, and lunar white-while its crown resembles a satin apple, a rosy cross between a virgin pincushion, a tulip bulb, and the head of a bubble gum cobra. And if it is a cobra, you are the charmers flute, for wherever you move, in your nervous shuffling, it follows, swaying, dancing, holding you in hazardous regard.
Blushing as violently as you have ever blushed in your life, you are nevertheless fascinated, mesmerized by the grace and polish of his stalwart member every bit as much as you were mesmerized by his feverish monologues. Furthermore, your knees feel like theyre made out of helium and chicken broth, and when Diamond reaches up to take you by the wrist, they not only feel weaker yet, one knee seems to want to go east, the other west, as
if to provide more space for the patch of moisture that is starting to spread in your underpants, accompanied by a melting sensation akin to that that the banana Popsicles must be experiencing here and there in Belfords apartment.
Diamond draws you closer. The next thing you know, you are on your knees. First shyly, then wholeheartedly, your lips collide. When his warm tongue explodes into your mouth, where it darts about like a hooked trout, where it turns your own tongue around and over, and over and around, like a cutlet in the grip of a zealous meat inspector, where it brushes and lathers and frescoes your palate ceiling like a mouse-sized Michelangelo wired on espresso; when that transpires, you fling the mess of leaves-ovate and lanceolate, peltate and perfoliate, orbicular and deltoid-against the wall, the toilet bowl, the side of the tub. Within seconds, you have replaced the vegetable matter with his … O God! Never have your fingers closed around anything so glossy and stiff and alive. So alive it is almost sonorous, so alive it is all you can do to hold on to it. It is as if you have grabbed a length of cable of such high voltage that it bucks, hisses, and sparks in your grip.
You feel his hand -somehow you sense its the one with the arcane tattoo-spider up your skirt. This is followed by the unmistakable sound of fabric in distress. Out of the corner of your eye, you see the shreds of your panties go flying by. It is the last thing you see, for like a teenager so blinded by those squirmy red winds of lust and longing (the ones that sirocco out of the chlorine pots of the soul) that concepts such as disease, pregnancy, or humiliation fade to black, you redundantly squeeze your eyes shut and roll slowly onto your spine, emitting little whimpering noises like a puppy in a snowbank.
What is he waiting for? Oh, yes, of course: the condom. How irresponsible of you to forget. But what is he saying? Down between your legs, you hear him growling, grunting, aahing, oohing, muttering. This is more than a vagina, this is a monstre sacrE! This is the pothole in which empires break their axles. These are the gates Samson couldnt pull down. The grin of the mollusk. The anthill of the miraculous! And so forth.
Good grief! You open your eyes, only to snap them shut again when you feel his long tongue swab you from your anus to your belly button. O God! What is he doing? You have heard about this from that filthy-minded Q-Jo, but never in your life … ! Your entire body quivers as he licks your vulva, you cry aloud when his tongue snakes in and out of you; and when, ever so tenderly, he takes your clitoris between his teeth-O God!
A moment later, his face -glistening with the brine of the portable tide pool-is above your face, kissing your eyelids open, and you feel his stiffness, slowly, slowly, inch by impudent inch, sliding into you, pushing rapture ahead of it like an embolus.
It is then that the whole building shakes, causing a toothbrush to fall off a shelf and bounce on the kilim beside your head; and your ears are filled with a series of rumblings and crashes, like the sounds of distant battle, and you think, Its true, the earth does move!
But wait a second. That noise. That noise. It sounds familiar… . Diamond smiles fatalistically, brakes his locomotive just short of your womb, and nodding in the direction of the ceiling, whispers, Ten oclock. Theyre bowling.
TEN A.M.
The carnal embrace is self-insulating. With efficient ease, it stifles all other biological urges, dissolves the intellect, and obliterates the conscience. If, while it endures, it can edit out hunger, fatigue, pain, time, reason, responsibility, and guilt, surely it can muffle the banal booms of bowling. And quickly enough, it does. Soon the ten-pin thunder is obscured by the softer slip-slap of his belly against yours-your skirt is up around your neck-and you are holding on for dear life to keep from plunging into the bottomless though narrow-walled pit of the fuck.
As your vaginal muscles contract around his phallus, the larger muscle of the fuck contracts around your being, and you feel as if you are being compressed into a single drop of musky fat, a dollop of electrified lard sizzling in a skillet upon a stove of silk. Your Bartholins glands are bobbing in their juices, and when, every now and again, his scrotum bangs against them, the white pony rears on the ridge. Let bones buckle! Let gristle grind! Let spit fly! Let …
Good grief. What now?
Diamond smiles fatalistically again, his rhythmic thrust sliding to a jerky halt. What is it, darling? you want to say. Please dont stop. Dont ever stop. No word leaves your mouth, however, and over your lovers shoulder, you glimpse the figure who has arrested his motion and chased the white pony off the back forty and into the mesquite.
Its Twister, for the sake of humble Jesus! Twister. The big Native American is standing in the bathroom doorway, impassive, nonplussed, so distracted he seems not to realize that he is the ultimate distraction, the personification of what is, next to death and call-waiting, the most unforgivable intrusion in the human universe: coitus interruptus. And as the blood rushes into your face with the speed of a bowling ball-you can almost hear it rumble-he says in a quiet voice that seems to come from very deep inside, Excuse me, Larry, but you told me to let you know when that Japanese doctor is on TV.
TEN OH-FIVE A.M.
Twister withdraws. Diamond doesnt-but you can feel him shrinking inside you. Bad timing, he says.
Uh-huh.
Success in life and love depends always on timing.
In the market, as well.
Totally. Good timing versus bad timing. This was bad.
Uh-huh.
Inopportune.
Yes. You feel him withering away. Where does it go when it goes?
But therell be other opportunities.
You cant tell if hes making a statement or asking a question, so you say, We should get up. He may come back.
No, Twisters in his tipi. However… . In one swift motion, he lifts his hips, pulling free of you, and lowers his head, kissing you sweetly. Then, backing up on his hands and knees, he plants a forceful kiss right at ground zero between your thighs. Licking his lips like a Bubba at a barbecue, he stands. Feeling suddenly very exposed and very shy, you scramble to your feet. As long as were up … he says.
What?
Well, Id rather like to have a peek at Yamaguchi. Would you mind?
I … uh… . You find your panties on the floor in a heap of foliage. Tattered and moist, they resemble what would have been left of Little Red Riding Hood if the woodsman hadnt shown up in time. I ought to freshen up.
Diamond takes the panties from you, holds them to his face, and inhales. A fresher peach than you, my dear, would still be on the bough.
You are about to protest when an aroma, not of your ruined underpants but of the scattered leaves, reminds you of his illness, of the hope that that goofy Yamaguchi might hold for a cure, and you allow him, after he puts his jeans on, to take your hand and lead you from the room. In leaving, you glance back, half smiling, half frowning, as if your confused brain is straining to comprehend. Did the most thrilling thing to ever happen to you, outside of the confines of Posner Lampard McEvoy and Jacobsen, actually just transpire on that bathroom floor?
TEN OH-SIX A.M.
Twisters flat, entered through an inconspicuous door on the right side of the vestibule, is furnished with Heritage House Early American pieces that to a Comanche, you suppose, must seem Late American and then some. To you, they just seem tacky, although definitely superior to Q-Jos thrift-shop heirlooms. His living room is equally as voluminous as Diamonds, but most of the furniture has been herded into one end of it, the far end, where it gathers dust and vibrates in harmony with the clattering ten-pins. At the near end, against the east wall, is a bulky old television cabinet. Facing it, in the middle of the room-the Indian must have better vision than you-is an uncomfortable-looking settee in a folksy calico print. Closer to the west wall, its back to the sofa, is a wooden colonial rocking chair, which you know to be a reproduction and imagine to be hard on the buns. Twister occupies the rocker, though he is not rocking. He is, in fact, so motionless he might be perched on a rock. He is staring at the wall or, rather, at a sm
all picture on the wall. That must be the famous Van Gogh. Naturally, you are anxious to examine it, but Diamond leads you directly to the sofa and bids you to sit down beside him.
Dont you have a TV? you whisper in his ear, the unfortunate one with the ring through it.
Threw it in the dumpster, he says. When I got back from Timbuktu. He fixes on the screen with the same attention that Twister devotes to the Van Gogh drawing, although he is flexible enough to run a hand up your skirt and squeeze your bare, sticky thigh. You flinch but neglect to resist. It must be because the market has crashed, you tell yourself. The fact that I seem to have lost all shame.
TEN OH-SEVEN A.M.
Apparently, Motofusa Yamaguchi has devoted the first few minutes of his press conference to an elaborate, rambling apology to Seattle and all of its men, women, and children; indeed, to humanity at large, for permitting strong drink to alter his rational responses, fog his judgment, and precipitate the farcical incident that occurred last evening, undermining, perhaps, public confidence in him and his medical methods. If the good doctor has lost face, however, if he is contemplating hara-kiri to avoid further disgrace, it is not blatantly evident in his demeanor. There is, in fact, an amused twinkle in his eye as he sits alone at a small, spotlit table in a hotel meeting room, tapping his considerable teeth with a Bic lighter, while a more somber spokesman, someone from the staff of the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, announces that Dr. Yamaguchi has decided to make public immediately certain details of his treatment that heretofore he had planned to reveal at tomorrows international conference. Presumably, this is an effort to restore faith. At any rate, an excited buzzing can be heard among the roomful of reporters, and Larry Diamond increases ever so slightly the pressure on your thigh. You glance at him, trying to comprehend what he must be going through. Empathize as you might, you remain undecided about whether the fact of his cancer increases or lessens your feeling of squalor.